Squad Seth was painted up in 2002 along with most of the rest of my Iacon Eldar. The concept was vaguely Egyptian themed, for a few different reasons. I am not a Stargate fan but I do like the look of some of the elements. Nonetheless, Stargate wasnt really an influence.

Mostly the colours chosen have Egyptian relevance. Gold is the colour of the flesh of the Egyptian gods. Lapis lazuli/faience (the turquoise/blue) is a common feature of Egyptian decoration, as is red.

Each squad is marked with a unique glyph. While I used hieroglyphs as reference when coming up with these, they are not really very Egyptian in look. Thats fine really though as while I like using that imagery as a reference, that is all it is supposed to be: a reference. These guys are supposed to be spacemen after all.

Some of the glyphs worked out better than others. Painting bright red detail on black like that was time consuming.

Biting Blade and Shuriken Pistol

Another element of the Iacon force was that I used a lot of Dark Eldar parts in with the regular Craftworld bits. While this was justified conceptually it was mainly just because I wanted to put together some stuff that wasnt directly off-the-peg. Additionally the variety helped to keep me interested while painting.

Striking Scorpions

Part of the concept was to make the Aspect Warriors bare headed. As the helmets are an intrinsic part of the Aspect Warrior concept, using different heads was going to make the Iacon Aspect Warriors unique immediately. It was a lot of work chopping off all of those heads and replacing them with others, something that I am not going to be in a hurry to do again.

Rear shot showing armour banding.

The concept of these Eldar walking the line between light and dark which is pursued a little via the bare headed Aspects, was pushed a little further with the Exarch. The Dark Eldar Incubi are essentially a “dark aspect”. This origins of the dark aspect come from the only Eldar Phoenix Lord to turn to the dark side: Ahra, Father of Scorpions, the Fallen Phoenix. Incubi have tall helms with a blaster mounted on the top that functions similarly to the Striking Scorpion Mandiblasters, so I went with a similar look on the Exarchs helmet.

Dark Aspect Warriors

Looking back at these guys I quite like how they turned out. Painting the gold areas was a huge chore however. Even if I had the patience to go to all of that trouble converting those figures again I would approach the painting of the gold areas very, very differently and probably more effectively now. I still think that the gold areas mostly look good, but they dont really reflect the large amount of grief that they caused me.

Chainsword and Shuriken Pistol

Despite all of the hassle that I had with these guys I do get a kick out of taking a look at them again some years later. I think that they are a cool looking unit and there is something about the slightly unusual colour scheme that I like.

Squad Damien is the third squad that I painted for my WH40k Chaos Space Marine force back in 1999. The figures used are vintage Chaos Renegades made by GW in the 1980s.

Chaos Renegades

I needed a unit to represent possessed space marines. I had some ideas about converting up my own figures (which came to fruition a year or two later with Squad Nemesis) but in the interim I thought that I would get some fun out of painting up these classic figures.

Nurgle Twins

Squad Damien took the field as possessed marines more often than not. The heavily mutated style was satisfyingly more extreme than most of the other marines that I used for my force, so they fit the role of possessed admirably.

Degenerate Chaos Space Marines

Like anything that I painted a long time ago (over a decade in this case) there are lots of things that I would do differently if I painted these figures again now. I still like these guys though: they were fun figures to paint, they are very characterful and amusing looking and I also played a lot of games with them over the years. Satisfying.